The institutions such as hospitals, hotels, cafeterias, restaurants, etc., daily meals must be prepared for large numbers of people. The various consecutive stages of food preparation for these daily meals are known, for example, to blue-ribbon chefs. They know that the task of preparing meals becomes very significant in terms of man-hours in a large institution where up to ten thousand or even more meals are served every day. Thus, the various stages mentioned must be closely coordinated and rendered as efficient as possible to meet the needs. Even then, however, such activity remains time-consuming and labour-intensive.
Accordingly, it has been proposed to change conventional methods of food preparation by putting prepared or cooked foodstuffs into plastic bags which are then sealed, labeled and kept in a refrigerated accommodation until ready for use. The sealed food containing bags, normally called pouches, may be of any convenient small size containing one or more portions of a variety of menus. Such a method possesses the following advantages:
(a) rush preparation of meals to meet meal-time deadlines is eliminated; PA0 (b) the distribution of meals is greatly simplified and also accelerated; and PA0 (c) the pouches effectively eliminate any chance of bacterial contamination, because the contents are not touched by human hands or exposed to any other source of contamination until the customers are ready to eat.
However, the above method involving refrigerated sealed pouches does create the new problem of quickly reheating the pouches to a desired temperature for serving and of quickly cooling the freshly-cooked foodstuffs prior to refrigeration of the same. Till now, this has been done by placing the pouches in still hot water or cold water baths; considerable time was required to obtain the desired change of pouch temperature. Also, the handling of the pouches was manual. It would therefore be highly desirable to have available a system or apparatus wherein the reheating and/or cooling of the pouches is greatly accelerated and the handling of the pouches is accelerated and simplified.